Dagmar Cyrulla @ James Makin Gallery

Dagmar Cyrulla’s paintings, showing at Melbourne's James Makin Gallery, seem to bear witness to humanity at its most characteristically vulnerable. It’s entirely fitting that, when we look at her quiet suburban narratives we wonder: about what has occurred; what might be about to happen; what we should feel for the protagonists. She captures that most essential element of the human condition. Doubt.

We humans are uncertain of our futures, about one another’s motives and about whether seeing really is believing. Cyrulla’s paintings are sometimes fragile strokes that try to piece together things we can’t understand, her brushstrokes are the like the smear of recall, the half remembered last whereabouts of the victim. At times they feel like crime scene reconstructions, at others they are memories of the moment just before we couldn’t go back. Then again the works might also be dispassionate reportage on the banalities of every day life. That uncertainty of intent makes them compelling.

These paintings feature adults and children reduced to their essentials. Clothes give little away, décor is functional, props are rarely more than vases of flowers. Yet amongst this a hand might be about to form a plea or a fist, a wet red smear of lip might be smiling and from that gesture alone the whole canvass is imbued with a sense of import. Cyrulla shows action and reaction rather than cause and effect, in doing so she presents characters whose own existential crises remain hidden. That alone engages us with the paintings in a powerful way, we look at the human and project our own experience. These are ambiguous scenes depicted ambiguously, they sometimes feel illicit, often powerfully sexual, but again and again those responses are magnified because of our own uncertainty. Most of the action in these paintings takes place in our own minds, which is why they are so very memorable.

Ambiguity keeps Cyrulla on the right side of voyeurism. We may be watching a woman dressing after an afternoon tryst with a lover, or we might not. If the circumstances were more explicit we would be plunged into judgement. Instead the uncertainty reminds us of the frailty of human experience, of the difficulty of our own decisions and desires. Cyrulla manages to give us a tender distance that manages to retain both complexity and emotion.

At first sight Cyrulla’s painting brings to mind the work of Eric Fischl, the American artist whose suburbs and hotel rooms present a sleazier voyeuristic update of Edward Hopper. The comparison falls when you see the amount of cultural baggage Fischl loads his paintings with, they are much closer to a closed meaning that the work here. If Fischl’s work has a writerly analogue it’s Bret Easton-Ellis if Cyrulla does it’s Raymond Carver. The moment captured in Cyrulla’s work often hangs like a non-sequitur and it’s no surprise that she evokes literary precedents. There’s something of the spareness of Carver in there, her economy of palate reminds one of his sentences. There’s no rush to sneer or judge as people are on the verge of the banal, the cruel or the mistaken. The careful and considered tonal palate stops things straying into sensationalism. It’s a rare thing in any art form to present humanity without the hysteria, a rare and worthy thing.

It is easier to be reminded of Degas precision in framing meaning or the tender colour blocks of Bonnard’s obsessive repainting of his wife as she bathed. In both cases, as with Cyrulla, the impression left is far stronger than the specifics recorded on the canvass. Cyrulla’s hidden eyes, smudged skin and mid-air gestures show rather than tell, this makes the work powerful as it invites rather than dictates response. In terms of art criticism both Degas and Bonnard tend to be noted for their formal qualities, but for the general viewer their popularity comes from a link between that and their human content. Like both of these Cyrulla captures the fleshiness and the ineffable spirit of the human through a style that favours impression over precision. We look at her paintings and feel them, as we see she understands that we are all messy, imprecise, flawed creatures in search of meaning and respect.

The characters in the paintings inhabit unsettling psychic environments. Doors and windows feature heavily with all their intimations of parting and arrival, voyeurism and display. The interiors are not overly symbolic or detailed, they take on character through colour. Kitchens are reduced to tobacco wood smears and carpets swirl dizzily beneath our feet. Showhome interiors become faintly nauseous with touches of green and yellow so that sometimes the events might be taking place underwater, with all the struggle and inevitability of drowning.

It’s erroneous to imagine that dramas are always played out in the shadows in a land of vast blue skies, the cruel light of day bears witness to as many pivotal moments. Cyrulla’s use of light can be shocking, the harsh whitening blues of the summer sun make her feel a very Australian painter. It is also the naturalism, and often softness, of the light that adds emotional depth to the paintings, they create real spaces rather than noirish film sets.

Cyrulla’s characters retain the dignity of mystery. They are not painted to the point of photo-realism nor are they loaded up with cultural signifiers that signpost a particular lifestyle. The wonder and danger of painting is that it can tell us too much about its subject, a problem that often pushes contemporary narrative painting into kitsch. The painter here understands that it is precisely our inability to know one another that fascinates, that the fact that we rarely give out our all to the world is the essence of human drama. There is something respectful in the way that Cyrulla handles characters by showing us only their essentials she allows them to keep hold of themselves.

The best art will always find a relationship between form, what’s on the canvass, and narrative, what’s in our minds. Dagmar Cyrulla paints profound things with a restraint that we can all recognise. It’s the restraint of survival and coping, of getting on with it, of human beings living. In these paintings Cyrulla has created something touching and universal.

On David to Cézanne @ AGNSW

Drawing is the genesis, the connective tissue and the human hand most clearly present in art. The naked line and the smear of graphite link us most closely to out prehistoric cave marking ancestors. Drawing is like song, it is primal and familiar even when it is sophisticated or novel. It's no wonder that we react so strongly to it. It is an expression of pure being, the visual manifestation of thought onto a surface, drawing is more like language than art. 'David to Cézanne' at the AGNSW, a collection of French nineteenth century drawings, takes an interesting period of mark making and makes it seem wholly new. The bookends of the period are the icy neo-classicism of David and the over-familiar world of later Impressionism. It strikes me that both have audience problems. David, Ingres and Delacroix trouble us, the scale and sheer painterly virtuosity seem strange to our eye today, whilst Cézanne, Monet and Degas are as familiar as our family's faces despite being part of the most radical artistic rupture of the last two hundred years (I would argue that the schisms of Abstraction, Surrealism and Conceptual Art are far less monumental precisely because of the scale and ambiton and context of the Impressionist project). The drawings of these artists, the thinking left behind, the preparation, the studies, offer an interesting way to approach then anew.

Scale is a the first thing that strikes us in the sensitively lit rooms. Drawing brings us into a direct human relationship with a work of art, even when the paintings we're familiar with are not huge their aura and reputations might be. Thus the big romantic gestures of Delacroix and the political geometries of David are made manageable. Seeing studies from the big academic painters like David, Ingres, Gericault and Delacroix is instructive. I don't imagine I'm alone in finding the early nineteenth century a period of French painting I find easier to admire than love. The paintings we know do feel like they're crying out for the electric jolt of the human. David's return to the classical is as much ideological as it is artistic, but he makes it hard to find a way in for humans. Banishing imperfection from society means removing asymmetry mess and clutter from art, the very things that we recognise as essentially human. It's hard to like let alone love. Unsurprisingly that sculptural regularity is here in the representations of Ingres too, although in paint it's more often hidden under folds and swatches of linen and silk.

More of a shock is to see the difference in the sketches of the two big name Romantic painters included, Gericault and Delacroix. The sublime volume of Delacroix is absent here and instead we see something quite static. His studies reveal a painter twisting figures into compositions, building up blocks of elements that will eventually create a structure. That's no surprise but what was was the lack of movement. When we move from an image like that of the 'Bucking Horse' even it seems static, the twist of the head like a the extreme twist of a Michelangelo torso. It feels more marble than flesh and I wonder if this accounts for the discomfort I feel with Delacroix: there's a lot going on but it never feels real.

On the other hand the sketches of Gericault capture sense of movement, anticipated or otherwise. 'The Murder of Fualdés' is like a slash of movement from left to right. The figures don't just claim blocks of space or twist in shows of heroic tension, rather they seem to propel the eye across the paper and in doing so create an illusion of energy. This makes for a much more vital scene than Delacroix achieves, the composition assists the narrative and everything else is subservient. Perhaps Delacroix suffers from a similar problem to David, in trying to capture the romantic spirit of the sublime he is in effect painting an ideology, making that feel human and authentic will always prove nigh on impossible. Gericault doesn't have that problem, narrative might be contrived but it is familiar and it taps into real emotions and responses.

Even when we move away from the big narratives it's easy to see something cinematic here. Before making that leap it's worth considering precisely what many of these drawings are for, they are studies or exploratory sketches for bigger works. That technical distinction ought not disqualify us from looking at them as sequential observations. Jean-Francois Millet's 'The Wool Carder', widely known in the form of an etching, is utterly extraordinary in this way. What we see on the paper is actually three images, the main picture of a statuesque woman at work grading wool, along side and over this are images of her hands and of her face. It is almost impossible to describe these without using the phrase 'close-ups' but as anachronistic as that is we can't help look at the woman, then at her face or her hands as if they had been intercut. Consciously or not Millet's shift from the general to the particular feels like a edited sequence from a film: A woman is at work, we cut to her calloused fingers teasing the wool and then to a close-up of her serene yet care-worn face. Of course it's illusory to look at Millet through the lens of cinematic editing but it makes the effect no less striking.

As so often happens in exhibitions that revisit French art of the Nineteenth Century the depth, breadth and power of the work that spiralled off of the Impressionist experiment is underlined. This is never unwelcome. Familiarity can lead us to take this extraordinary period for granted. Here charcoal and crayon are used to create an impression, a smear of sentiment, a dark smudge of intense feeling. The formal innovations of impressionism often focus on its relationship to colour, to its optical restlessness as it sought to capture ephemeral light on things. Seeing these monotone drawings reminds us that the medium and the paper have a creative relationship, the crayon itself is like a haze that allows us to see. This is beautifully illustrated in 'Woman on a Parapet' by Georges Seurat. Mist or smoke or twilight seems to coalesce into form, as a woman looks over a railing and into the distance. The only truly dark solid form is a pillar in the left foreground, it makes the woman's shape seem all the more fleeting. The image is like a rumour or a memory, she appears and yet she may be gone soon. The woman, the skeletal trees in the background and the spray of light are only just there, the marks that hint at them rubbed onto the grain of the paper. It's a simple image but it has a meditative effect, light marks on paper promise deep interior life.

Another image that stays once outside in the daylight is fully of burnt black dark. Albert Lebourg's 'The Artist's Wife and Mother-in-Law Sewing by Lamplight' captures the brilliantly mundane in a flash of dark. The two women sewing here are revealed only and precisely where the light of the lamp falls. That focal point of illumination is the the strange centre of the image, it sits centre, middle and front a white hot filament of chalk, it isolates essentials, hands and lips and eyes downcast in concentration and gives a domestic scene chiaroscuro drama. The act of looking into the dark of this picture has a deeply empathetic pull, to concentrate and pick out features is to sew in the smoky half light with all the care and concentration that requires. It is worth pausing here to remember that Impression grew from the roots put down by Realism and that the dignity of humble labour is often one of its most compelling subjects.

Without the necessity of monumental scale or the need for a brighter more varied palette many of these drawings find grace in their restraint. Drawn portraits can be a shift from painted convention. Often they are simply studies but this can give them the immediacy of photography as the artist seeks to capture posture and expression. This isn't to say that those are absent from their formal painted portraits simply that emphasis changes. The need to display clothing, the symbolic mise-en-scene and the attendant conventions, be they social realism or social status, in commissioned paintings changes the balance away from the minutiae of the sitter. The portraits here are interesting for their focus on the face. Ingres may have catalogued the French ruling class in it's Imperial splendour, laden in finery loaded with very specific meanings for sitters and viewers, but his drawings feel more psychologically compelling. The image of his wife here, only her face perfectly rendered in pencil, has the tenderness of the beloved and a sense of curious amusement that might never make its way into a formal portrait. In drawing artists appear to be seeking the essence and when this is human it's no surprise that we find these so moving.

The realism that demonstrates itself elsewhere as a documentary record of labours also forces itself out off of the paper in the strikingly modern portrait of the 'Head of a Woman' by Henri Lehmann. The crease of her brow and the straggle of hair is unusual enough but the kiss of red chalk on blue paper gives blood to the face and a light touch makes her fleshy rather than formal. As this is a sketch Lehmann isolates the face so that we can't see period context of clothing. This purely practical feature gives us a shiver of recognition one hundred and fifty years later, it allows us to look at a woman of our own time, someone thoughtful, perturbed, alerted. That surprising immediacy might be what makes this show so effective within its quite modest scope.

This is so far from a blockbuster, but that's not a criticism. Over the last year or so I find myself happily immersed in modest but thoughtful shows at the AGNSW. The pleasures are often cerebral and contemplative, beauty can be found in connections and in quiet pieces waiting to be considered quietly. The AGNSW has stumbled a little with its blockbusters (Rupert Bunny anyone?) but with shows like this it does something of far greater value than simply rolling out celebrity crowd pleasers. I'd love to see serious shows of Mantegna or Zurbaran or Cassatt or Sickert or Twombly (well I can hope) but in their absence I like this public service curating and look forward to more suprising gems.

On Joan Ross @ Gallery Barry Keldoulis

Oh, what to do? Since starting ArtKritique I've wrestled with what to do when I come across truly bad art, should one just ignore it like a one would a bratty and attention seeking child? After all the characteristics are often the same so surely the logic follows that, properly ignored, it ought to go away. But of course it never goes away, some perverse family circle encourages it ever more, teachers smile approvingly, its told that it's big and clever and its rewarded for its persistent repetition. And that's the problem. Bad art, dumb art with delusions of intellect, single-idea-no-talent art is nurtured by a whole promotional and curatorial eco-system that has a vested interest in the Emperor believing his suit is just dandy. That bugs me.

On a grey day off when I wandered upon the day-glo installation of Joan Ross's 'Enter At Your Own Risk' at Gallery Barry Keldoulis all of my buttons were pressed at once. Here was a work (works?) that delivered the full checklist of dumb art cliches: the mistaking of clumsy oxymorons for complexity, the equation of ugliness with aesthetic challenge and the complete misapprehension that such institutionally nourished work represents any kind of threat.

The best way to describe the installation, housed in a white warehouse space, is as a recreation of the contents of a particular type of Australia home, perhaps lower middle class, perhaps still anchored in the Fifties. Every element, and there are a lot of elements, has been rendered in a high visibility day-glo yellow. The decorations are heavy on the heavy handed Australian Colonial iconography, native fora, shocks of animal pelt and doctored period landscapes. It's as though we're looking at Colonial Australia through the nostalgic lens of Nineteen Fifties (or perhaps, Sixties or Seventies) Australia and the post-modern day-glo aesthetic of the Eighties. The rather confused message seems to be something like 'something that was kitsch is now even more kitsch', it's hard to say really but you do sense that there is something portentous afoot, there always is when colonialism is invoked. The problem here is that the artist appears to mistake a series of truisms, 'the representation of early colonial Australia was ideologically determined' or 'Fifties Australia is all a bit embarrassing to us now' and mistakes them for profundity. If these were more insightful they wold create some kind of tension, but there's a palpable absence of that kind of dialectic. Which probably explains why everything is painted bright yellow. Or not.

This highlights a problem with much conceptual art. Shock value or novelty (here recreating a room and making all its components day-glo yellow) is the dominant currency for a certain kind of contemporary artist and it's really easy to see how works like this begin with the question "What would be really different?" Novelty in itself is not offensive, however for conceptual art to work it first demands some kind of intellectual rigour or complexity. Simply picking up some familiar old art theory assumptions, which have the aura of rigour because they once originated in academia is not the same. It's stupid and lazy and all a bit pointless. But there you have it. A lot of art, art like this, is stuck in a self-serving vortex of novelty and self-congratulation that's been polished up with hints of old cultural studies debates. Perhaps we can just ignore it and it will go away. Otherwise we can just take the piss out of it, not part with our money and hope that it will go home and have a long hard think about just how silly it's been.

European Masters @ NGV

I normally try to avoid comment on how exhibitions are branded or what they're called. In the case of 'European Masters' the NGV's show of works from Frankfurt's Stådel Museum. The problem might be that the catch all title doesn't quite capture what's going on here. The lead image of a Renoir lunch suggests an impressionist blockbuster awaits inside. Instead the NGV houses a path through the neurotic spasms of a national identity seeking a form. That nation is Germany through the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century. There's some great and compelling works hung inside here but there's also a lot of painting that is, frankly, kitsch and odd. Edited and pulled together it creates an interesting narrative, made sinister as we know the tragic point where it ends. So whilst there are great examples of Degas and Bonnard here they're not the real story, instead the odd procession from Romanticism through Symbolism to Expressionism captures something much stranger, if less immediately pleasurable.

German Romanticism is a complex set of impulses. Here it encompasses the neo-classicism, pagan fantasies and historical mythmaking. The pictures here show less of the primal urge toward the sublime that we might find in Casper David Freidrich and a far more twee version. Medieval and classical figures find themselves in the dark German forests, forging a link between the geography and culture. The images are polite, bloodless and a highly mediated version of nature making this very different fare to Romantics such as Goya or Turner operating elsewhere. Lighting is often theatrical and compositions tend to signpost the meaningful relation between the landscape and those inserted into it leaving each work looking like a restrained polemic. What becomes clear here, and never leaves through the rest of the rooms, is a penchant for fairly heavy handed symbolism without a corresponding stylistic tension. The approach feels all or nothing. Certain works look like academic exercises whilst others are full of bombast, all too often what they fail to provide is depth or ambiguity.

It seems fitting that in amongst the German work, and a respectable room of impressionism, there are smatterings of artists like James Ensor and Henri Rousseau, who are almost sui generis and and yet seem to add to the feverish searching of German artists. Amongst these figures is Odilon Redon. The work 'Christ and the Samaritan Woman' is of such hallucinatory beauty and mystical strangeness that one can hardly bear to walk away from it. There is a biblical story in there somewhere but it hardly matters. A Christ figure, manifests out of a layers of ochre at once a mirage and the memory of someone real. In the foreground the profile of a woman who is almost sculptural but who, with the greatest economy of paint, appears to be in a state of transcendent serenity. There's an abstract splash of purple in the middle of the frame and a scarlet wound of paint, like the sacred heart and something like a cloud or a splash below Christ, describing them is hard but together they feel like something necessary and essential that happens between these two figures. The tenderly minimal expressions (both have eyes downcast or closed) convey a sense of grace and surrender and allow us to identify the human core of something deeply spiritual. It's a wonderful quiet painting.

There are surprises. Wilhelm Trübner's 'Moor Reading a Newspaper' is beautiful and a real shock. This small portrait takes on the drab black blues and greens of workman's serge and imparts an oily quality to the air. The composition cuts the frame in a diagonal as the seated figures rest his feet, the light of a nineteenth century room hardly picking out black skin. It's the light that makes this so brilliant though. The only objects that stick out form a line across the middle of the painting, a pair of gloves on the empty portion of the chaise, the snow white newspaper and a hat and cane. This isn't a work that attempts o make exotic, rather one that defiantly normalises with symbols of bourgeois life. The newspaper, holding its form in a black hand is genuinely shocking, it's the last way you'd expect a black man in 1870's Germany (a mere ten years after American emancipation) to be presented.

There's a point in the exhibition where we see things start to lose their serene myth building. Where the subject and implicitly the viewer violently shifts. This is best seen in the way women become vampires and harpies having been the maidens and nymphs of a mythical bucolic past. Hindsight makes it tempting, and all too easy, to draw sociological and political conclusions but even if we avoid them it's clear that colour and form begin to change. There is a line of sinister, grotesque women that begins to appear with the symbolists. We see Lovis Corinth's slutty daubs and palate knived flesh and the bone pale temptress of Max Liebermann's 'Samson and Delilah' and, in both, women's skin itself seems toxic and dangerous, evidence of something hateful inside. This is where Max Slevogt's 'Frau Aventiture' is so revealing both thematically and the way paint restlessly clings to the canvass. The areas of pink and grey, flesh and steel, hard and soft just reinforces the idea of a conflict between male and female. What appears to be happening is unsure, a knight either lifting or strangling a naked woman, you can't help feeling it's the latter as it all takes place on a queasy green darkness. Without delving into the sexual politics it is both bravura and unpleasant.

It's probably not the done thing to express a pretty much blanket dislike for the many strands of German Expressionism. I've often thought that if anything were going to make an art movement impervious to criticism it was its censure by Adolf Hitler. This might be the root of my problem with the German strand of Expressionism. I understand the context and significance of Max Beckmann but more often than not his paintings descend into a caricature of neuroses on canvas. The twisted geometry and ugly decapitated proportions feel like a potent political cri de couer but are all angular aggression. It's hard to love these pictures even when, as in 'The Circus Carriage' Beckmann is creating and exposing his own personal mythology. Context can define the value of a political act, and Beckmann's defiance of Naziism through paint is inspirational, it can't determine aesthetic response.

My lack of sympathy for much expressionism comes from its inability to give a human access point to the work. The dark and light all comes in a flash in expressionism, and then another flash and a series of fireworks on top of one another until we're blinded. It's a sensational conceit but it suffers from a law of diminishing returns as the volume is constantly turned up to eleven. The work from the painters of 'Die Brücke' and the Expressionists here is often violently ugly. It often uses the clash of colour, and also of expectation of shape and colour, to to create a sensory disruption that has a psychological analogue. The effectiveness is undeniable but the sheer boldness make the works one dimensional. Whether these are the response to a violent world or the expression of an assaulted psyche or otherwise doesn't really matter, they seem to take a single emotional dimension at the expense of subtlety or ambiguity. That heavy handedness can be seen here in work by Emil Nolde and Franz Marc and it's as alienating as any Brechtian technique. This is in sharp contrast to works by artists such as Egon Schiele who captured no less angst and shock but retain their effectiveness because they're shown in concert with the brittle frailty of people.

There are two different stories at play in 'European Masters'. In one there is the battle for the visual identity of a nation, the discovery and rejection of a mythology. The second only just begins in the final room. It shows how the early Twentieth Century was less a crossroads for art and more a spawning ground. Multiple avant gardes and modernisms spring from it, the battle becoming one for self-expression rather than a single path or movement. All through this show there are works of power and beauty: August Macke's 'Naked girl with Headscarf', Kirchner's 'Reclining Woman in White Chemise' or Ferdinand Hodler's 'Childhood' all have the power to move. As an exhibition this challenges and enlightens which is in itself a fine thing, that much of the work might not be to my taste doesn't really matter and I'm simply glad the NGV have tried to tell an important story.

On Runa Islam @ MCA

There's something comforting throughout the MCA's small but stunning Runa Islam retrospective, the analogue flicker of 16mm film, the gentle hum of spindle and the clatter of sprockets creates a welcoming soundtrack. The retro technology has a qualitative effect on all of the film pieces on show, there's a warmth and an intimacy in the medium that reflects much of the subject matter. The first couple of works one comes across borrow heavily from the past. One might be an Andy Warhol screentest, another takes the cold light of Fassbinder and the slow deliberate pans of Antonioni, together this seems like a visit to the past. However as you watch and spend time in and with these works you feel something very different. The icy nihilism of Warhol is nowhere to be found nor is the dispassionate dialectic of the modernist filmmakers, this work feels much more tangible and sympathetic but no less intellectually rigorous. In fact 'Assault', Islam's version of the Warhol 'Screen Tests' breaks down the cold modernist stare by involving and implicating the viewer. Here a young androgyne man is filmed having light shone through coloured gels directly into his eyes. To see the piece properly we have to stand in front of the translucent screen it's projected on, this when the light is at its strongest and the subject squints so does the viewer. It's tricksy and not entirely successful but it shows something that makes Islam interesting, she privileges the senses over the intellectual. This makes her far more affecting than any number media theorists and it gives the work depth and intrigue.

The most ambitious work here 'Scale 1/16 inch = 1 foot' hints at narrative as it focusses on reality and representation. In it a concrete multi-storey car park sits above a non-descript town like a spaceship landed. The film explores the car park and issues arising. The mildewed concrete of a Sixties municipal edifice are contrasted with the brilliant orange of chairs in a restaurant, and immediately a space is created between the idea of town planner's utopia and urban decay. The camera takes on a dispassionate and clinical role as it surveys the building, it is geometrically gorgeous but sits oddly amongst Victorian terraces and whilst this isn't a rant against brutalist architecture it is nonetheless unsettling. The name of the film can be pinned down to format and subject, Two interlinked reels are projected, on on to a small screen hanging in front of a much larger one. At times the images interact, most obviously when one screen has the camera moving around the exterior of the car-park and on the other the same movement is played out on an architect's scale model. The whole film gives a sense of dislocation, between people and their environment, between intention and result and between aesthetics and lived reality. It rewards viewing and is much more satisfying than its tricksy conceit might suggest.

'The House Belongs To Those Who Inhabit It' simply explores a derelict warehouse. A projection onto a suspended screen hangs in front of a dark wall but also seems to cut through it. A camera with a narrow field of vision, giving no sense of anything peripheral simply scans its surroundings, up and down and panning along. The movement and the blinkered field is unsettling, the whole picture refuses to reveal itself and as the camera moves around it takes on an urgent personality. we can imagine our surroundings but we will only believe our eyes. The screen becomes our aperture into another world from which we have been separated and in doing so it makes us much more conscious and appreciative of its details. In fact this is a familiar theme across the works here, Islam is concerned with the particularity of the senses, of their capacity to comfort or confuse us.

The heightened sensory property of film is again explored in 'Be the first to see what you see as you see it'. It looks like Fassbinder but feels like Hitchcock. In its almost narrative a girl in a china showroom lifts, rocks and spins pieces of porcelain. Watching her as coffee pots wobble is like waiting for a bomb to explode in a thriller. Islam doesn't just rely on the implicit fragility of china as symbol but layers on a brittle naturalistic soundtrack and has the protagonist touch the fragile crockery in extreme close up. What Islam manages to do is contrast experience with imagination, the whole film is a tease, we expect something to smash soon but it is always simply concentrating on the physicality of the object. The effect is at once hypnotic and thought provoking.

Runa Islam is a film buff's delight. She takes on Tarkovsky's 'Stalker', almost everything by Antonioni and the saturated directness of Fassbinder. This magpie borrowing makes it easy to see the works here as small essays on film history and the properties of a medium. It seems to me this is a lazy and narrow reading of what she does as despite these elements the films are far more emotional and visceral than conceptual. What Islam does is use the properties of film, when stripped of the demands of narrative, to explore how we experience our surroundings whether mediated by film or not. This makes the films curious and ruminative, they challenge us through our senses rather than through contrived visual oxymorons. The fact that these films have such a physical presence and effect is testimony that this is much more than 'art as lecture'. Runa Islam is asking us to consider how we see the world rather than how we see film, that's a far more righteous challenge.

On 'Exit Through The Gift Shop'

I just can't help myself. The more I think about 'Exit Through The Gift Shop' a film by stencil artist Banksy the more I get the whiff of bad faith and it's not a smell I like. That's not to say it isn't smart, at times thoughtful and always entertaining - it's just that it looks and sounds like someone who's done really well out of a fairly modest situationist-lite pop-art derivative complaining about all the factors that have allowed him to be successful. That's not terribly edifying.

The story is fairly simple. An amiable French caricature, Thierry Guetta, obsessively films a new and growing generation of street artists. Eventually the camera turns on him and the film becomes a document of his bombastic and derivative entry into the art world. It's very funny. Guetta, or 'Mr BrainWash' as he styles himself once he becomes an artist, is a classic comic creation. He has the lack of self awareness that makes for great mockumentary characters, the film becomes "Inspector Clouseau meets Spinal Tap with a spray can". Of course the 'is he, isn't he?' question is the viral heart of the film. Mister Brainwash looks very much like a comic creation, his history seems to coincide with that of the production of the film. He is both its subject an its creation and the ambiguity around whether this is a real documentary of not can only be good for box-office.

A lot of things ring just wrong enough to make you smell le rat. The main one for me, perhaps with an English ear, is the sound of Banksy's diction. His observations sound well scripted and badly acted, even with his voice going through a distorting filter it's clear that this isn't spontaneous speech. Some of the wrongness is probably imaginary, like the uncanny resemblance between Thierry and Rob Schnieder, but still distracting. It feels like a big in-joke. The fact that Mr Brainwash provided the cover for Madonna's album 'Celebration' makes you think like it might be. Throughout you can almost hear the smug laughter of celebrities imagining they're being transgressive.

There's plenty to like about Banksy. He's not just a smug post-pop arsehole he's genuinely witty (visually and verbally) and he uses absurd juxtapositions for the right reasons. His kissing coppers and Ramallah wall stencils are clever and righteous, they undermine power through wicked humour. He quotes from art history relentlessly but you sense that he's only doing it to create a shared objective base for the twist of satire he brings to his subject. That said it's undeniable that Banksy is a bit of a one line joke, the images are conceptual jokes that feel both right and wrong, you smile, maybe laugh and then they're gone. This film's a bit like that. Banksy can't be held responsible for the imitators who have followed in his wake but he can't pretend not to have benefitted from the street art boom. 'Wall and Piece', the book he published in 2005 is a bestseller reaching out to the alternative middlebrow coffee table market.

I don't have anything against anti-establishment artists making money, far from it. However I do have a natural inclination for intellectual rigour. Creating a crass talentless version of yourself and watching him succeed in just the same cultural and commercial milieu you thrive in doesn't seem all that smart. Thierry puts on a massive post-modern mess of a pop art spectacle. Of course people come to it, but that doesn't make them stupid.

Ostensibly the joke is on the art market. Prices for street art rise and rise and the implicit message in the film is "you idiots will buy ANYTHING". That might be a fair critique but it's one made fairly gently, it would have been interesting to see the kind of collectors who will pay millions of dollars to see what started on a wall put into a frame. Instead, particularly in the shots of the concert sized crowds waiting to get into MBW's show, the joke is on the great unwashed who've been lured by the bait of free art. It's a cheap shot but one supposes more comfortable than potentially upsetting the real money who buy the real Banksy.

So the film comes with a giant set of inverted commas. The ironies are trowelled on, but the one never explored is that we seem to be watching a rogue and anti-establishment art form complaining about how it has been commoditized even when many of the artists concerned, from Banksy himself through to Shepard Fairey have thriving industries based around them. It's a fairly conservative moan and even if the whole movie is an elaborate spoof it isn't a terribly radical one. I quite like the Banksy who picks big targets, who takes on power with pisstaking and releases a dangerous idea with a spraycan. Given the context of some of the fights he's picked 'Exit Through The Gift Shop' all seems a bit too smug and whingey.

On Alfred Stieglitz @ AGNSW

Perhaps nothing is so hard to look at and value as photography. The ubiquity of the photographic reproduction, the infinite possibilities of photoshop and the blur between art and advertising has meant that art photography is less and less compelling. That makes an exhibition such as Alfred Stieglitz: The Lake George Years (worth a click for the excellent video introduction) at Sydney's AGNSW all the more shocking. A show that might have been of interest for its historical content, exploring the work of genuine pioneer, eschews trickery, celebrity and massive scale and delivers something quietly breathtaking.

I didn't expect to have my prejudices about size and art reinforced here but they were. It's refreshing to see images so small and so perfect. Some of my nervousness about photography is in its easy default to massive prints that bludgeon the viewer. This monumental urge undermines an art form that has an enormous potential for intimacy. Intimacy is precisely what we see here. Fittingly the Stieglitz exhibition is situated a couple of floors above the AGNSW's abstraction show. Stieglitz uses the camera and film as neutral tools for expression, much of the work here is virtually abstract, tiny essays on light and dark and the music of nature. It's difficult to imagine how strange these images must have looked. Roughly contemporaneous with cubism and expressionism the earliest works here cut up urban America and arrange it in grids of silver grey and black.

The studies of light and weather might be Stieglitz's most radical contribution to art. In painting they would be both impressionist and expressionist, in the context of photography they show how the camera could compose in light and form rather than simply record, that it could capture some of the sublime effect nature has upon us without simply describing it. These series, the 'Equivalents', 'Songs of the Sky' and 'Music' get close to the central paradox of photography: How does a technology that chemically records the fall and reflection of light on objects allow an artist to express their own vision? Stieglitz uses the light bouncing off and passing through clouds to turn them into abstract expressions, we don't see clouds as much as we see the shine and depth of greys that seems to capture the sublimity of nature. The cloud images are more romantic than they are meteorological.

Stripping the images of earthbound reference Stieglitz relies instead on the way that the natural light interplays with the structural formation of the clouds. He isn't a child seeking familiar or anthropomorphic shapes in the skies rather he's exploring the possibilities of dark and light and how they might provide analogues for emotion and experience. This isn't stage set chiaroscuro but a sensitive play with pattern and contrast and how they might evoke something deep within the viewer.

Photographic portraits have had a profound and disruptive effect on the painted portrait, what has been for centuries the core of art and patronage. Stieglitz's portraits of friends and fellow artists show a restraint that's touching and rare today but, at the same time, betray the stylistic signatures of an auteur. These understated image often include a compositional element of a framing device, as shape or object, within the rectangle of the image and behind the sitters head. It's a simple device that borrows from the painted technique. The sitters head is isolated, we focus on the essentials. The effect also creates a perspectival link somewhere behind the sitter, so we can't help but feel Stieglitz has taken us into their space. But perhaps most touchingly Stieglitz has created a fragile halo, a remnant from an ancient tradition, behind these naked faces conferring on them some kind of modernist beatification.

The series of studies by Stieglitz of his lover and later wife Georgia O'Keefe are stunning in the tender proximity between subject and artist. Taken over a period of thirty years they are a clear a melding of obsessive love and pictorial technique as any set of pictures, perhaps even those Bonnard painted of his wife Marthe over almost fifty years. These photographs might be unique as the added frisson of O'Keeffe as artist/muse adds layers of possible meaning.

O'Keeffe has suffered as have other female modernists, Frida Kahlo and Camille Claudel come to mind, from a feminist tendency toward hagiography that privileges biography over work. It's understandable but it lessens the impact of the artworks themselves and that's a shame. What makes the portraits of O'Keeffe so remarkable is that they feel so unmediated by culture, history or interpretation. It's a raw vision of an artist that is a meditation in flesh and geometry and light. When seen as a series these pictures are achingly beautiful, they paint a portrait of love and trust but their repetition also reminds us that Stieglitz, who can't of been short of sitters, was simply endlessly fascinated by his lover and wife.

The portrait, from 1931, when they had been married for seven years, reduces the artist to her hands cradling a sun bleached cow's skull. Of course that skull is a familiar and powerful motif from O'Keeffe's paintings but here it looks chalkier, like unglazed porcelain, as she cradles it in tanned hands. The skull serves as reference to both art and nature but most powerfully to the omnipresence of mortality, the way the hands hold it is almost an embrace, one doesn't need to understand the relationship between artist and sitter here to get a whiff of the complex and profound feelings at play.

Stieglitz's intention is clearly to capture the essence of someone. This makes his use of hands fascinating, they appear as body parts, almost abstracted, but they are always more than objects and retain the essential personality of their owner almost like ones voice. Hands and gestures are fascinating because we never perceive them as still, so even in a hundred year old photograph they seem to be captured at a point between movements. Similarly whatever this human essence is it has infinite manifestations, people are too complex despite what we might believe of an artist's powers and a single image will never suffice. Stieglitz is like someone chasing light around the facets of a diamond, he seems to know the best he can do is capture moments and angles in light. He uses O'Keefe's hands, her human geometry but never tries to reduce her, just to capture something fleeting. Many of these photographs, and in a sense all of them in their totality, are like haiku in gelatin silver.

Stieglitz is too easily bundled in amongst a rush to the reductions of modernism and cubism, the time he inhabits and the new technology he is stretching make that almost inevitable. On looking at the images here it feels like a mistake to label him that simply. We can see hints of the abstract, the grids of Mondrian or the blocks of Braque, but his work is as human and as smudged as a fingerprint. It is this sense of flaw and serendipity is what makes him so different to photographers like Man Ray for Stieglitz seems to embrace the beauty of imperfection. The memorable works here inhabit a world of infinite shining gradations between black and white, they are expansive and open rather than reductive and finished, in doing this Stieglitz's greatest innovation might be to take a static form and make it so intensely moving.